SHOOTING DESTINATION MOON

“Why don’t they make more science fiction movies?”
The answer to any question starting, “Why don’t they—” is almost always,
“Money.”
I arrived in Hollywood with no knowledge of motion picture production or
costs, no experience in writing screen plays, nothing but a yen to write the
first Hollywood picture about the first trip to the Moon. Lou Schor, an agent
who is also a science fiction enthusiast, introduced me to a screen writer,
Alford van Ronkel; between us we turned out a screen play from one of my
space travel stories.
So we were in business— Uh, not quite. The greatest single production
problem
is to find someone willing to risk the money. People who have spare millions
of dollars do not acquire them by playing angel to science fiction writers with
wild ideas.
We were fortunate in meeting George Pal of George Pal Productions, who
became infected with the same madness. So we had a producer—now we
were in business.
Still not quite— Producers and financiers are not the same thing. It was
nearly a year from the writing of the screen play until George Pal informed us
that he had managed to convince an angel. (How? Hypnosis? Drugs? I’ll
never know. If! had a million dollars, I would sit on it and shoot the first six
science fiction writers who came my way with screen plays.)
Despite those huge Hollywood salaries, money is as hard to get in Hollywood
as anywhere. The money men in Hollywood write large checks only when
competition leaves them no alternative; they prefer to write small checks, or
no checks at all. Even though past the big hurdle of getting the picture
financed, money trouble remains with one throughout production; if a solution
to a special-effects problem costs thirty thousand dollars but the budget says
five thousand dollars, then you have got to think of an equally good five
thousand dollar gølution—and that’s all there is to it.

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.1 mention this because there came a steady stream of non-motion-picture
folk who were under the impression ~hat thousand-dollar-a-week salaries
were waiting for them in a science fiction picture. The budget said, “No!”
The second biggest hurdle to producing an accurate and convincing science
fiction picture is the “Hollywood” frame of mind—in this case, people in
authority who either don’t know or don’t care about scientific correctness and
plausibility. Ignorance can be coped with; when a man asks “What does a
rocket have to push against, out there in space?” it is possible to explain. On
the other hand, if his approach is, “Nobody has ever been to the Moon; the
audiences won’t know the difference,” it is impossible to explain anything to
him; he does not know and does not want to know.

We had plenty of bothsorts of trouble.

That the picture did not end up as a piece of fantasy, having only a comic-
book relation to real science fiction1 can be attributed almost entirely to the
integrity and.:~
good taste of Irving Pichel, the director. Mr. Pichel is not a scientist, but he is
intelligent and honest. He believed what Mr. Bonestell and I told him and saw
to it that what went on the screen was as accurate as budget and ingenuity
would permit.
By the time the picture was being shot the entire company—actors, grips,
cameramen, office people— became imbued with enthusiasm for producing
a picture which would be scientifically acceptable as well as a box office
success. Willy Ley’s Rockets and Space Travel was read by dozens of
people in the company. Bonestell and Ley’s Conquest of Space was
published about then and enjoyed a brisk sale among us. Waits between
takes were filled by discussions of theory and future prospects of
interplanetary travel.
As shooting progressed we began to be deluged with visitors of technical
background—guided missiles men, astronomers, rocket engineers, aircraft
engineers. The company, seeing that their work was being taken seriously by
technical specialists, took pride in turning out an authentic job. There were no
more remarks of “What difference does it make?”
Which brings us to the third hurdle—the technical difficulties of filming a
spaceship picture.
The best way to photograph space flight convincingly would be to raise a few
hundred million dollars, get together a scientific and engineering staff of the
caliber used to make the A-bomb, take over the facilities of General Electric,
White Sands, and Douglas Aircraft, and build a spaceship.

Then go along and photograph what happens.

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We had to use the second-best method—which meant that every shot, save
for a few before takeoff from Earth, had to involve special effects, trick
photography, unheard-of lighting problems. All this is expensive and causes
business managers to grow stomach ulcers. In the ordinary motion picture
there may be a scene or two
with special effects; this picture had to be all special effects, most of them
never before tried.
If you have not yet seen the picture, I suggest that you do not read further
until after you have seen it; in this case it is more fun to be fooled. Then, if
you want to loOk for special effects, you can go back and see the picture
again. (Adv.)
The Moon is airless, subject only to one-sixth gravity, bathed in undiluted
sunlight, covered with black sky through which shine brilliant stars,
undimmed by cloud or smog. It is a place of magnificent distances and
towering mountains.
A sound stage is usually about thirty feet high, and perhaps a hundred and
fifty feet long. Gravity is Earth normal. It is filled with cigarette smoke, arc light
fog, and dust—not to mention more than a hundred technicians.
Problem: to photograph in a sound stage men making a rocket landing on the
Moon, exploring its endless vistas, moving and jumping under its light gravity.
Do this in Technicolor, which adds a sheaf of new problems, not the least of
which is the effect of extra hot lights on men wearing spacesuits.

The quick answer is that it can’t be done. -
A second answer is to go on location, pick a likely stretch of desert, remove
by hand all trace of vegetation, and shoot the “real” thing. Wait a minute; how
about that black and star-studded sky? Fake it—use special effects. Sorry;
once blue sky is on Technicolor emulsion it is there to stay. With black-and-
white there are ways, but not with color.
So we are back on the sound stage and we have to shoot it there. Vacuum
clear atmosphere? No smoking—hard tb enforce—high speed on all blowers,
be resigned to throwing away some footage, and leave the big doors open—
which lets in noise and ruins the sound track. Very well, we must dub in the
sound—and up go the costs—but the air must be clear.

Low gravity and tremendous leaps—piano wire, of
course—but did you ever try to wire a man who is wearing a spacesuit? The
wires have to get inside that suit at several points, producingthe effect a nail
has on a tire, i.e., a man -wearing a pressurized suit cannot be suspended on
wires. So inflation of suits must be replaced by padding; at least during wired
shots. But a padded suit does not wrinkle the same way a pressurized suit
does and the difference shows. Furthermore, the zippered openings for the

3

wires can be seen. Still worse, if inflation is to be faked with padding, how are
we to show them putting on their suits? -
That sobbing in the background comes from the technical adviser—yours
truly—who had hoped not only to have authentic pressure suits but had
expected to be able to cool the actors under the lights by the expansion of
gas from their air bottles. Now they must wear lamb’s wool padding and will
have no selfcontained source of breathing air, a situation roughly equivalent
to doing heavy work at noon in desert summer, in a fur coat while wearing a
bucket over your head. Actors are a hardy breed. They did it.
To get around the shortcomings of padded suits we worked in an
“establishing scene” in which the suits were shown to be of two parts, an
outer chafing suit and an inner pressure suit. This makes sense; deep-sea
divers often use chafing suits over their pressure suits, particularly when
working around coral. The relationship is that of an automobile tire carcass to
the inner tube. The outer part takes the beating and the inner part holds the
• pressure. It is good engineering and we present this new wrinkle in

spacesuits without apology. The first men actually to walk the rugged floor
of the Moon and to climb its sharp peaks, will, if they are wise, use the
same device. - -

So we padded for wire tricks and used air pressure at other times. Try to see
when and where we switched. I could nça tell—and I saw the scenes being
shot.
• Now for that lunar landscape which has to be compressed into a sound

stage—I had selected the crater Aristarchus. Chesley Bonestell did not
like Aristarchus; it did not have the shape he wanted, nor the height of
Crater wall, nor the distance to apparent horizon. Mr. Bonestell knows
more about the surface appearance of the Moon than any other living
man; he searched around and found one he liked—the crater Harpalus, in
high northern latitude, facing the Earth. High latitude was necessary so
that the Earth would appear down near the horizon where the camera
could see it and still pick up some lunar landscape; northern latitude was
preferred so that Earth would appear in the conventional and recognizable
schoolroom-globe attitude.

Having selected it, Mr. Bonestell made a modeftf it on his dining room table,
using beaverboard, plasticine, tissue paper, paint, anything at hand. He then
made a pinhole photograph from its center— Wait; let’s list the stages:

1. A Mount Wilson observatory photograph.
2. Bonestell’s tabletop model.
3. A pinhole panorama.
4. A large blowup. -

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5. A Bonestell oil painting, in his exact detail, about twenty feet long and

two feet high, in perspective as seen from the exit of the rocket, one
hundred fifteen feet above the lunar surface.

6. A blownup photograph, about three feet high, of this painting.
7. A scenic painting, about four feet high, based on this photograph and

matching the Bonestell colors, but with the perspective geometrically
changed to bring the observer down to the lunar floor.

8. A scenic backing, twenty feet high, to go all around a sound stage,

based on the one above, but
with the perspective distorted to allow for the fact that sound stages are
oblong.

9. A floor for the sound stage, curved up to bring the foreground of the

scene into correct perspective with the backing. -

10. A second back drop of black velvet and “stars.”

The result you see on the cover of this issue. It looks like a Bonestell
painting because jt is a Bonestell painting—in the same sense that a
Michelangelo muraI~ is still the work of the master even though a dozen
of the master’s pupils may have wielded the brushes.
Every item went through similar stages. I was amazed at the
thoroughness of preliminary study made by the art department—Ernst
Fegte and Jerry Pycha—before any item was built to be photographed.
Take the control room of the spaceship. This compartment was shaped
like the frustrum of a cone and was located near the nose of spaceship
Luna. It contained four acceleration couches, instruments and controls of
many sorts, an airplane pilot’s seat with controls for landing on Earth,
radar screens, portholes, and a hatch to the air lock—an incredibly
crowded and complicated set. (To the motion picture business this was
merely a “set,” a place where actors would be photographed while
speaking lines.)
To add to the complications the actors would sometimes read their lines
while hanging upside down in midair in this set, or walking up one of its
vertical walls. Add that the space was completely enclosed, about as
small as an elevator cage, and had to contain a Technicolor sound
camera housed in its huge soundproof box—called a “blimp,” heaven
knows why. -
I made some rough sketches. Chesley. Bonestell translated these into
smooth drawings, adding in his own extensive knowledge of spaceships.
The miniature shop made a model which was studied by the director, the
art

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director, and the cameraman, who promptly tore it to bits. It wouldn’t do
at all; the action could not be photographed, could not even be seen,
save by an Arcturian Bug-Eyed Monster with eyes arranged around a
spherical 3600.
So the miniature shop made another model, to suit photOgraphic
requirements. -
So I tore that one apart. I swore that I wouldn’t be found dead around a
so-called spaceship control room arranged in any such fashion; what
were we making? A comic strip?

So the miniature shop made a third model.
And a fourth. -

• Finally we all were satisfied. The result, as you see it on the screen, is a

control room which might very well be used as a pattern for the ship which
will actually make the trip some day, provided the ship is intended for a
four-man crew. It is a proper piece of economical functional design, which
could do what it is meant to do.

But it has the unique virtue that it can be photographed as a motion picture
set.
A writer—a fiction writer, I mean; not a screen writer—is never bothered by
such considerations. He can play a dramatic scene inside a barrel quite as
well a.~ in Grand Central Station. His mind’s eye looks in any direction, at
any distance, with no transition troubles and no jerkiness. He can explain
anything which is not clear. But in motion pictures the camera has got to see
what is going on and must see it in such a fashion that the audience is not
even- aware of the camera, or the illusion is lost. The camera must see all
that it needs to see to achieve a single emotional effect from a single angle,
without bobbing back and forth, or indulging in awkward, ill-timed cuts. This
problem is always present in motion picture photography; it was simply
exceptionally acute in the control room scenes. To solve it all was a real tour
deforce; the director of photography, Lionel Linden,
aged several years before we got out of that electronic Iron Maiden.
In addition to arranging the interior for camera angles it was necessary. to get
the camera to the selected angles—in this enclosed space. To accomplish
this, every panel in the control room was made removable— “wild,” they call
it—so that the camera could stick in its snout and so that lights could be
rigged. Top and bottom and all its sides—it came apart like a piece of
Meccano. This meant building of steel instead of the cheap beaverboard-
and-wood frauds usually photographed in Hollywood. The control room was
actually stronger and heavier than a real spaceship control room would be.
Up went the costs again.

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Even with the set entirely “wild” it took much, much longer to shift from one
angle to another angle than it does on a normal movie set, as those panels
had to be bolted and unbolted, heavy lights had to be rigged and unrigged—
and thç costs go sky high. You can figure overhead in a sound stage at about
a thousand dollars an hour, so, when in the movie you see the pilot turn his
head and speak to -someone, then glance down at his instruments,
whereupon the camera also glances down to let you see what he is talking
about, remember how much time and planning and money it took to let you
glance at the instrument board. This will help to show why motion picture
theaters sell popcorn to break even
• and why science fiction pictures are not made every day. Realism is

confoundedly expensive.

Nor did the costs and the headaches with the control room stop there. As
every reader of Astounding knows, when a rocket ship is not blasting,
everything in it floats free—”free fall.” Men float around—which meant piano
wires inside that claustrophobic little closet. It was necessary at one point to
show a man floating out from his acceleration couch and into the center of
the room.
Very well;, unbolt a panel to let in the wires. Wups! While a spaceship in
space has no “up” or “down,” sound stage three on Las Palmas Avenue in
Hollywood certainly does have; supporting wires must run vertically—see
Isaac Newton. To float the man out of the tight little space he was in would
require the wires to turn a corner. Now we needed a Hindu fakir capable of
the Indian rope trick.
The special effects man, Lee Zavitz, has been doing impossible tricks for
years. He turned the entire set, tons of steel, on its side and pulled the actor
out in what would-normally be a horizontal direction. Easy!
So easy that the art department had to design, double gimbals capable of
housing the entire set, engineer it, have it built of structural steel, have it
assembled inside a sound stage since it was too big to go through the truck
doors. Machinery had to be designed and installed to turn the unwieldy thing.
Nothing like it had ever been seen in Hollywood, but it did enable a man to
float out from a confined space and, later, to walk all around the sides of the
control room with “magnetic” boots.
This double gimbals rig, three stories high, put- the control room set high in
the air, so the carpenters had to build platforms around it and the camera had
to be mounted on a giant boom—one so huge, so fancy, and so expensive
that Cecil B. de Mule came over to inspect it. The camera itself had to be
mounted in gimbals before it was placed on the boom, so that it might turn
with the set—or the other way, for some special effects. This meant removing
its soundproof blimp, which meant dubbing the sound track.

7

(“Who cares? It’s only money.” Don’t say that in the presence of the business
manager, he’s not feeling well.)
This was not the end of the control room tricks. Some of the dodges were
obvious, such as making dial needles go around, lights blink on and off,
television and radar screens light up—obvious, but tedious and sometimes
difficult. Producing the effect of a ship blasting off at six gravities requires
something more than sound track of a
rocket blast, as the men each weigh over a thousand pounds during blast.
Lee Zavitz and his crew built large inflated bladders into each acceleration
couch. Whenever the jet was “fired” these blaaders would be suddenly
deflated and the actors would be “crushed” down into their cushions.
A thousand pounds weight compresses the man as well as his mattress,
which will show, of course, in his features. The makeup man fitted each actor
with a thin membrane, glued to his face, to which a yoke could be rigged
back of his neck. From the yoke a lever sequence reaching out of the scene
permitted the man’s features to be drawn back by the “terrible” acceleration.
Part of what you see is acting by some fine actors, Dick Wesson, Warner
AndersOn, Tom Powers, John Archer, part was a Rube Goldberg trick.
The air suddenly escaping from the bladders produced a sound like that of a
mournful cow, thus requiring more dubbing of sound tr~ck. The air had to be
returned to the bladders with equal suddenness when the jet cut off, which
required a compressed air system more complicated than that used by a
service station.
The sets abounded in compressed air and hydraulic and electrical systems to
make vai~ious gadgets work— to cycle the air lock doors, to rig out the exit
ladder, to make the instrument board work—all designed by Zavitz. Lee
Zavitz is the man who “burned Atlanta” in Gone With The Wind, forty acres of
real fire, hundreds of actors and not a man hurt. I saw him stumped just once
in this film, through no fault of his. He was controlling an explosion following a
rocket crash. It was being done full size, out on the Mojave Desert, and the
camera angle stretched over miles of real desert. From a jeep back of the
camera Zavitz was cuing the special effects by radio. In the middle of the
explosions the radio ‘decided to blow a tube—and the action stopped, ruining
an afternoon’s work. We had to come back and do it over the next day, after
a sleepless night of rebuilding by the special effects
crew. Such things are why making motion pictures produces stomach ulcers
but not boredom.
The greatest single difficulty we encountered in trying to fake realistically the
conditions of space flight was in producing the brilliant starry sky of empty
space. In the first place nobody knows what stars look like out in space; it is
not even known for sure whether twinkling takes place in the eye or in the

8

atmosphere. There is plausible theory each way. In- the second place the
eye is incredibly more sensitive than is Technicolor film; the lights had to be
brighter than stars to be picked up at all. In the third place, film, whether used
at Palomar or in a Technicolor camera, reports a point light source as a circle
of light, with diameter dependent on intensity. On that score alone we were
whipped as to complete realism; there is no way to avoid the peculiarities
inherent in an artificial optical system.
We fiddled around with several dodges and finally settled on automobile
headlight bulbs. They can be burned white, if you don’t mipd burning out a
few bulbs; they cOme in various brightnesses; and they give as near a point
source of light as the emulsions can record— more so, in fact. We used
nearly two thousand of them, — strung on seventy thousand feet of wire.
But we got a red halation around the white lights. This resulted from the fact
that Technicolor uses three fihns for the three primary colors. Two of them
are back to back at the focal plane, but the red-sensitive emulsion is a gnat’s
whisker away, by one emulsion thickness. It had. me stumped, but not the
head gaffer. He. covered each~ light with a green gelatin screen, a “gel,” and
the red halation was gone, leaving a satisfactory white light.
The gels melted down oftener than the bulbs burned out; we had to replace
them each -day at lunch hour and at “wrap up.”
There was another acute problem of lighting on the lunar set. As we all know,
sunlight on the Moon is the
harshest of plastic light, of great intensity and all from one direction. There is
no blue sky overhead to diffuse the light and fill the shadows. We needed a
sound-stage light which-would. be as intense as that sunlight—a single light.

No such light has ever been developed.

During the war, I had a research project which called for the duplication of
sunlight; I can state authoritatively that sunlight has not yet been duplicated.
An arc light, screened by Pyrex, is the closest thing to it yet known— but the
movies already use- arc lights in great numbers, and the largest arc light
bulb, the “brute,” is not nearly strong enough to light an entire sound stage
with sunlight intensity—raw sunlight, beating down on the lunar set would
have been equivalent to more than fifteen hundred horse power. There are
no such arc lights.
We traced down several rumors of extremely intense lights. In each case we
found either that the light was not sufficiently intense for an entire sound
stage, or it was monochromatic—worse than useless for Technicolor.
We got around it by using great banks of brutes, all oriented the same way
and screened to produce approximate parallelism. Even with the rafters
loaded with the big lights almost past the safety point, it was necessary to
use some cross lighting to fill gaps. The surface of the Moon had some

9

degree of “fill” in the shadows by reflection from cliff walls and the ground; it
is probable that we were forced to fill too much. We used the best that
contemporary engineering provides—and next time will gladly use an atomic-
powered simulation of the Sun’s atomic-powered light.
The simulation of raw sunlight was better in the scenes involving men in
spacesuits outside the ship in space, as it was not necessary to illuminate an
entire sound stage but only two or three human figures; a bank of brutes
sufficed and no fill was needed, nor wanted, since there was no surrounding
landscape to fill by reflection.

The effect was rather ghostly; the men were lighted as
is the Moon in half phase, brilliantly on one side, totally unhighted and
indistinguishable from the black sky itself on the other side.
This scene in which men are outside the ship in space involved another
special effect—the use of a compressed oxygen bottle as a makeshift rocket
motor to rescue a man who has floated free of the ship. The energy stored by
compressing gas in a large steel bottle is quite sufficient for the purpose. I
checked theory by experiment; opening the valve wide on such a charged
bottle gave me a firm shove. The method is the same as that used to propel
a toy boat with a CO2 cartridge from a fizz water bottle—the basic rocket
principle.
We had considered using a shotgun, since everyone is familiar with its kick,
but we couldn’t think of an excuse for taking a shotgun to the Moon. Then we
considered using a Very pistol, which has a strong kick and which might well
be taken to the Moon for signaling. But it did not look convincing and it
involved great fire hazard in a sound stage. So we settled on the oxygen
bottle, which looked impressive, would work, and would certainly be available
in a spaceship. -
However, since we were still on Las Palmas Avenue and not in space, it had
to be a wire trick, with four men on wires, not to mention the oxygen bottle
and several safety lines. That adds up to about thirty-six wires for the heavy
ubjects and dozens of black threads for the safety lines—and all this
spaghetti must not show. Each man had to have several “puppeteers” to
handle him, by means of heavy welded pipe frames not unlike the cradles
used by Tony Sarg for his marionettes, but strong enough for men, not dolls.
These in turn had to be handled by block and tackle and overhead traveling
cranes. Underneath all was a safety net just to reassure the actors and to
keep Lee Zavitz from worrying; our safety factor on each rig was actually in
excess of forty, as each wire had a breaking strength of eight hundred
pounds. To top it off each man had to wear a cumbersome, welded iron,
articulated harness under his spacesuit for attachment of wires. Thi~ was
about as heavy and uncomfortable as. medieval armor.

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The setups seemed to take forever. Actors would have to be up in the air on
wires for as long as two hours just to shoot a few seconds of film. For ease in
handling, the “oxygen bottle” was built of balsa wood and embedded in it was
a small CO2 bottle of the fire extinguisher type. This produced another
headache, as, after a few seconds of use, it would begin to produce carbon
dioxide “snow,” which fell straight down and ruined the illusion. -
But the wires were our real headache. One member of the special effects
crew did nothing all day long but trot around with a thirty-foot pole with a
paint-soaked sponge on the end, trying to kill highlights on the wires. Usually
he was successful, but we would never know until we saw it on the screen in
the daily rushes. When he was not successful, we had to go back and do the
whole tedious job over again.
Most of creating the illusion of space travel lay not in such major efforts, but
in constant attention to minor details. For example, the crew members are
entering the air lock to go outside the ship in free fall. They -are wearing
“magnetic” boots, so we don’t have to wire them at this point. Everything in
the airlock is bolted down, so there is nothing to spoil the illusion of no up-
and-down. Very well—”Quiet, everybody! Roll ‘em!”

“Speed!” answers the sound man. -
“Action!”

The actors go to the lockers in which their spacesuits are kept, open them—
and the suits are hanging straight down, which puts us back on Las Palmas
Avenue! “Hold it! Kill it! Where is Lee Zavitz?”
So the suits are hastily looped up with black thread into a satisfactory
“floating” appearance, and we start over. - -
Such details are ordinarily the business of the script girl who can always be
depended on to see to it that a burning cigarette laid down on Monday the
third will be exactly the same length when it is picked up on Wednesday the
nineteenth. But it is too much to expect a script
• girl to be a space flight expert. However, by the end of the picture, our

script clerk, Cora Palmatier, could pick flaws in the most carefully
constructed space yarn. In fact, everybody got into the -act and many
flaws were corrected not because I spotted them but through the alertness
and helpfulness of others of the hundred-odd persons it takes to shoot a
scene. Realism is compounded of minor details, most of them easy to
handle if noticed. For example, we used a very simple dodge to simulate a
Geiger counter—we used a real one.

A mass of background work went into the flight of the spaceship Luna which
appears only indirectly on the screen. Save for the atomic-powered jet, a
point which had to be assumed, the rest of the ship and its flight were
planned as if the trip actually were to have been made. The mass ratio was
correct for the assumed thrust and for what the ship was expected to do. The

11

jet speed was consistent with the mass ratio. The trajectory times and
distances were all carefully-plotted, so that it was possi- ble to refer to charts
and tell just what angle the Earth or the Moon would subtend to the camera
at any given instant in the story. This was based on a precise orbit—
calculated, not by me, but by your old friend, Dr. Robert S. Richardson of
Mount Wilson and Palomar Mountain. -

None of these calculations appears on the screen but the results do. The
Luna took off from Lucerne Valley in California on June 20

th

at ten minutes to

four, zone eight time, with a half Moon overhead and the Sun just below the
eastern horizon. It blasted for three minutes and fifty secOnds and cut off at
an altitude of eight hundred seven miles, at escape speed in a forty-six-hour
• orbit. Few of these data are given the audience—but what the audience

sees out the ports is consistent with

the above. The time at which they pass the speed of sound, the time at which
they burst up into sunlight, the Bonestell backdrops of Los Angçles County
and of the western part of the United States, all these things match up. Later,
- in the approach to the Moon, the same care was used.
Since despite all wishful thinking we are still back on Las Pahmas Avenue,
much of the effect of taking off from Earth, hurtling through space and landing
on the Moon had to be done in miniature. George Pal was known for his
“Puppetoons” before he started producing feature pictures; his staff is
unquestionably the most skilled in the world in producing three-dimensional
animation. John Abbott, director of animation, ate, slept, and dreamed the
Moon for months to accomplish the few bits of animation necessary to 1111
the gaps in the live action. Abbott’s work is successful dnly when it isn’t
noticed. I’ll warrant that you won’t notice it, save by logical deduction, i.e.,
since no One has been to the Moon as yet, the shots showing the approach
for landing on the Moon must be animation—and they are. Again, in the early
part- of the picture you will see the Luna in Lucerne Valley of the Mojave
Desert. You know that the ship is full size for you see men-climbing around it,
working on it, getting in the elevator of the Gantry crane and entering it—and
it is full size; we trucked it in pieces to the desert and set it up there. Then
you will see the Gantry crane pull away and the Luna blasts off for space.

That can’t be full -size; no one has ever done it.

Try to find the transition point. Even money says you pick a point either too
late or too soon.
The Luna herself is one hundred fifty feet tall; the table top model of her and
the miniature Gantry crane are watchmaker’s dreams. The miniature
floodlights mounted on the crane are the size of my little fingeftip— and they

12

work. - Such animation is done by infinite patience and skill. Twenty-four
separate planned and
scaled setups are required for each second of animation on the screen. Five
minutes of animation took longer to photograph than the eighty minutes of
live action. -
At one point it seemed that all this planning and effort would come to nothing;
the powers-that-be decided that the story was too cold and called in a
musical comedy writer to liven it up with—sssh!—sex. For a time we had a
version of the script which included dude ranches, cowboys, guitars and
hillbilly songs on the Moon, a trio of female hepsters singing into a mike,
interiors of cocktail lounges, and more of the like, combined with
pseudoscientific gimmicks which would- have puzzled
• even Flash Gordon.
It was never shot. That was the wildest detour on the road to the Moon; the
fact that the Luna got back into orbit can be attributed to the calm insistence
of Irving; Piçhel. But it gives one a chilling notion of what we mayexpect from
time to time. -
Somehow, the day came when the last scene had ~ shot and, despite
Hollywood detours, we had made amotion picture of the first trip to the Moon.
Irving Pichel~ said, “Print it!” for the last time, and we adjourned to~ celebrate
at a bar the- producer had set up in one end of the stage. I tried to assess my
personal account sheet—i1~. had cost me eighteen months’ work, my peace
of mind,4i and almost all of my remaining hair.

Nevertheless, when I saw the “rough cut” of th~

picture, it seemed to have been worth it.

.

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